[Continued from Friday’s Part 1.] By: David A. Smith Although half of January’s post concerned themselves with the unhappy past, the other half looked at the emerging, even disrupted, future, starting with the visible-yet-covert dissolution of urban zoning by Airbnb and its local ‘hosts,’ who are multiplying invisibly, as revealed in Aiding and a-bedding? Part 1, […]

By: David A. Smith A new year means a new beginning and new resolutions, and 2015’s first post completed the story of Detroit’s financial death-and-rebirth through bankruptcy, though to hear the New York Times tell it, Detroit’s recovery would be A fleeting miracle? Part 2, As long as the city recovers: Public-employee pension funds are […]

By: David A. Smith [Continued from Friday’s Part 2 and the preceding Part 1.] Though a cemetery, as profiled in yesterday’s summary of December, is real estate used by and for the dead, and before there is a cemetery, there can also be a property that is used by no one, because those who would have […]

By: David A. Smith [Continued from Wednesday’s Part 1.] So substantive was December’s eleven-part post on the pending privatization (resident right-to-buy action) of Southbridge Towers that not only did it take up half the month’s posting, my excerpted month-in-review summary spilled over from Wednesday’s Part 1, as in four more parts I brought the story up to […]

By: David A. Smith Compared with all the generations that came before us, we today live in a world of unprecedented rate of change, both in dimensions – technology, medicine/ biology, war/conflict, and human society/ moral values – and in speed. To survive and orient within this continuous shock of the new, we have learned […]